Galactic winds are a crucial ingredient in galaxy evolution, but the physics of the ubiquitous outflowing high velocity gas seen from rapidly star-forming galaxies remains unknown. I will describe a series of projects designed to shed light on these open questions, with a focus on how to produce cool atomic and warm photo-ionized gas at high velocities. One idea is to precipitate the cool gas from the super-heated hot phase on scales outside the host galaxy. Another option is to directly accelerate the cool gas from the galaxy with momentum injection, perhaps provided by cosmic rays, or a putative fast, hot wind. I will highlight challenges on both the observational and theoretical fronts, and connect to observational constraints on physical scales ranging from the host galaxy's molecular clouds to its circumgalactic medium.
BIO
A member of the Ohio State faculty since 2007, Prof. Thompson is a theoretical astrophysicist. He received his B.A. in physics and philosophy in 1997 from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, and his Ph.D. in physics in 2002 from the University of Arizona, Tucson. He was a Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley from 2002-2005 and a Lyman Spitzer Fellow at Princeton University from 2005-2007 before joining Ohio State. Thompson has made contributions to the theory of core-collapse supernovae, the origin of the heavy r-process elements, the physics of the far-infrared and gamma-ray - radio correlations of star-forming galaxies, the theory of galactic winds and massive star feedback, the dynamics of triple systems, and the discovery of new black hole - stellar binary star systems. He is a core member of the All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASAS-SN). He is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, a Simons Foundation Fellowship in Theoretical Physics, and an Einstein Junior Visiting Professorship from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 2014, he was awarded Ohio State University’s highest teaching award, the Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching, and in 2020 he was named an Ohio State University Distinguished Scholar.
Host: Wei Zhu
